If I am a musical thinker

This little, special, brilliant book on composition kind of cuts directly to how I feel about aesthetics, consciousness and identity. I first read Talk: If I am a musical thinker, by Ben Boretz, when I was in college, where he was a music teacher. It is an artists book, with images and text laid out on each page, a series of words and ink spots. I remember that it felt so ART to me. It's amazing that it still resonates. Although my grasp of this kind of language has improved tremendously, the words still speak to the very same place in me.

If I am a musical thinker is a transcription of a talk given in Austin to the Texas Society for Music Theory in 1981, and rewritten for the graduate student composers' colloquium at Princeton in '82. I think it's so cool that this is the kind of stuff I was reading and thinking about when I was 18.

It is very short, but very dense. Each sentence needs to be read twice. I would like to quote the entire piece. But won't:

So if I want to know

what music expresses,

and if I want to know why

I think about music,

I have to introspect

my own experience,

my experience of my own needs

an my experience

of how,

and which, and in what way,

needs are being fulfilled or engaged

in the transaction of musical activity.

Primally, I need identity -- as much of it as I can amass; for my need for identity is mutually articulated with my terror of annihilation.

And identity is sought through expression;

the media of expression are what I find

to texture and realize my expressive needs;


and the effectiveness of a medium, of

my media, in drawing out from me

an adequate depth and breadth of expression

will determine, ultimately, what --

and how much -- I can be for myself.